Journal of Social History articles from March 1994

Journal of Social History archives from March 1994

Changes in leisure activities, 1890-1940.
March 22, 1994... Interpretations of what makes twentieth-century American life "modern" occasionally treat changes in how Americans spend their leisure time. This paper addresses three common claims about the modernization of leisure, that: (1) organized pastimes...

Working class protest, popular revolt, and urban insurrection in Argentina: the 1969 Cordobazo.
March 22, 1994... Introduction The working class protest, popular revolt, and urban insurrection which shook Argentina's second industrial city, Cordoba, on May 29-30, 1969 attracted shortly thereafter the brief but intense interest of scholars, primarily...

Orphans and the transition from slave to free labor in Northeast Brazil: the case of Campina Grande, 1850-1888.
March 22, 1994... The end of the African slave trade in 1850 signalled a coming labor crisis in Brazil. Between 1850 and abolition in 1888 the balance of slave distribution in the Brazilian empire shifted significantly as slaveowners in the North and Northeast...

Friendship and family in early modern England: the sociability of Adam Eyre and Samuel Pepys.
March 22, 1994... Well, a pox on love and wenching! Women serve but to keep a man from better company. . . . I tell you, 'tis as hard to be a good fellow, a good friend, and a lover of women, as 'tis to be a good fellow, a good friend, and a lover of money. You...

The gender division of labor in the production of textiles in eighteenth-century, rural Pennsylvania (rethinking the New England model).
March 22, 1994... everything that went with them including several servant weavers. 77. Gervase Markham, The English Housewife, Michael R. Best, ed. (Kingston and Montreal, 1986), p. 152. 78. Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century...

Gender and the family labor system: defining work in the rural Midwest. (Midwestern States)
March 22, 1994... A common theme of Hamlin Garland's realistic short stories about the late-nineteenth-century Midwest was the difference in sexual divisions of labor in immigrant and Yankee families. Educated in American schools, daughters of immigrants in his...

Antislavery and political economy in the early Victorian House of Commons: a research note on "capitalist hegemony."
March 22, 1994... Half a century ago Eric Williams argued that a close connection existed between capitalism and slavery. According to Williams, slave trade profits provided a capital base for Western Europe's economic expansion; ultimately a more mature...

The European Experience of Declining Fertility: A Quiet Revolution, 1850-1970.
March 22, 1994... I Taken together, this collection of essays provides the most innovative attempt thus far to explain the decline of fertility in Europe. The Introduction lays out an ambitious project: in contrast to the normal emphasis on socioeconomic...

Getting Work: Philadelphia, 1840-1950.
March 22, 1994... "Transactions in the labor market are never simple" (256), Walter Licht remarks in concluding his penetrating study of the complexities of securing and losing work in Philadelphia. Blending exhaustive empirical findings with a critical...

Rechts und Links in Europa: Ein Beitrag zur Semantik und Symbolik der Geschlechterpolaritat.
March 22, 1994... In this interesting book, Leeuwen-Turnovcova employs an interdisciplinary method to investigate the origins and significance of the negative associations of left-ness and positive connotations of right-ness in European languages, cultures, social...

Social Paralysis and Social Change: British Working-Class Education in the Nineteenth Century.
March 22, 1994... This book grows in stature as it proceeds. It offers a sociologically-informed but not theoretically-dominated analysis of the development of working-class education in Britain (including Scotland, Wales and Ireland and incorporating a brief...

Boomer: Railroad Memoirs.
March 22, 1994... Boomer is the autobiography of one of the first women brakemen hired in the early 1970s on the Southern Pacific line. After surviving the "derail" or probationary period, Niemann gets laid off from the Stockton, California switching yard because...

Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial North America.
March 22, 1994... Axtell's latest book is a collection of essays, most of which originated as lectures and were then published in historical journals or as part of conference proceedings. There are eleven essays altogether. The first essay serves as a good...

White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-Industrial South Africa: The Making of the Colonial Order in the Eastern Cape, 1770-1865.
March 22, 1994... A few years ago interdisciplinary-minded historians aped social scientists. We crunched numbers, ran regression analyses, placed the dead on couches. In our enthusiasm we made messes. Sometimes we forgot that the aim of our craft is to interpret...

The Formation of a Planter Elite: Jonathan Bryan and the Southern Colonial Frontier.
March 22, 1994... Alan Gallay's thorough and perceptive biography of Jonathan Bryan makes a significant contribution to the growing body of innovative scholarship on the early American frontier. His portrayal of Bryan's economic and political ambitions, leavened...

Slaves, Peasants and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery.
March 22, 1994... In these five essays Stuart Schwartz brings together primary materials and synthesized secondary studies to re-examine several of the major problematics of Colonial Brazilian History, with special reference to slavery. Although four of the five...

Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth Century Louisiana.
March 22, 1994... In Sweet Chariot, Ann Patton Malone analyzes data from 155 Louisiana slave communities during the period 1810 to 1865. Malone's research is exhaustive, making particular use of probate court records, as well as wills, letters, and other primary...

The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe.
March 22, 1994... This volume consists of thirteen papers presented at a conference at the University of Rochester in 1988; these are prefaced by a 20 page introduction on the gainers and losers in the Atlantic slave trade by the editors. Nine of the thirteen...

Poor and Pregnant in Paris: Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century.
March 22, 1994... Rachel Fuchs's excellent new study of poor, primarily unmarried, pregnant women and new mothers in nineteenth-century Paris is a sequel (or perhaps prequel) to her Abandoned Children: Foundlings and Child Welfare in Nineteenth-Century France...

In the Web of Class: Delinquents and Reformers in Boston, 1810s-1930s.
March 22, 1994... Eric Schneider has written a sophisticated and compelling analysis of the origins and development of the juvenile justice system in the United States. His study is the first to demonstrate the critical relationship between the history of social...

The Fin-De-Siecle Culture of Adolescence.
March 22, 1994... One of Neubauer's major contentions that "in the decades around 1900 adolescence 'came of age'" is well supported by the previous works of John Gillis, John Springhall, Harry Hendrick, Carol Dyhouse, Joseph Kett, and others. Most would also agree...

The Roman Family.
March 22, 1994... The present uncertainty, not to say disagreement, regarding the family and its attendant "values" points to a need for understanding the institution in historical societies. If nothing else, we might at least gain an idea of the range of...

The Politics of Rural Life: Political Mobilization in the French Countryside, 1846-1852.
March 22, 1994... How the Second Republic was beautiful! How neat and accommodating were those events as they were played out again and again in the texts of the professional historian: the economic crisis, the common man's call for justice, the initial...

Old and New Nobility in Aix-En-Provence, 1600-1695: Portrait of an Urban Elite.
March 22, 1994... In this clearly presented and well-written book, Donna Bohanan has made an important contribution to our understanding of the realities concerning nobility in early modern, and particularly seventeenth-century France. She has done this first of...

The Ideology of the Great Fear: The Soissonnais in 1789.
March 22, 1994... Clay Ramsay presents us with the first book-length study of the Great Fear of 1789 since the publication of Georges Lefebvre's La Grande Peur in 1932. Ramsay shares Lefebvre's definition of the events of that July: a collective panic triggered by...

The Counter-Reformation in the Villages: Religion and Reform in the Bishopric of Speyer, 1560-1720.
March 22, 1994... More and more issues have come to be included under the rubric "the social history of the Reformation." Where once historians focused on the reception of Luther's ideas in an urban environment during the critical 1520s, they now cover a wider...

Fire From Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... What divided seventeenth-century Puritans from other Anglicans was not theology, but practice. Puritans were determined to create the New Jerusalem by reforming society. When much of Dorchester was destroyed by fire in 1613, the town's Puritans...

Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes.
March 22, 1994... This is a remarkable book, part ethnography and social history, part legal scholarship, part provocative if not totally successful social science. It offers a good introduction to law and economics and law and society approaches to social...

The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishment in Early America.
March 22, 1994... The era of the American Revolution that enshrined liberty as the greatest good also devised the penitentiary, an institution of sanction that provided for an individual's complete loss of liberty. Why did the penitentiary arise when it did? Why...

France at the Crystal Palace: Bourgeois Taste and Artisan Manufacture in the Nineteenth Century.
March 22, 1994... Given the recent conclusion of the 1992 World's Fair in Seville, Whitney Walton's study of the French presence at the very first World's Fair, held in London in 1851, is not only timely but welcome. None of the visitors to the Great Exhibition of...

Victorian America and the Civil War.
March 22, 1994... For social historians, Anne Rose's Victorian America and the Civil War will cause some initial discomfort but will ultimately offer a provocative view on the intellectual and cultural effects of the war. As the title suggests, Rose believes that...

Keepers of the Flame: The Role of Fire in American Culture, 1775-1925.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... From the title of this book, one expects a cultural history of fire in American life. What follows does not fulfill this expectation, for Keepers of the Flame partakes more of social than cultural history. However it is categorized, the book will...

The Uskoks of Senj: Piracy, Banditry, and Holy War in the Sixteenth-Century Adriatic.
March 22, 1994... The uskoks of Senj were irregular soldiers of the Habsburg Military Frontier in the sixteenth century, who lived by warfare or banditry, depending on the occasion and the perspective, and acted from their Adriatic base at the borders of the...

Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture.
March 22, 1994... In recent years, our society has been obsessed with what appears to be a growing incidence of child sexual abuse by adults. The allegations against Woody Allen and Michael Jackson are just the latest in a long line of child-sex scandals that have...

Voluntary Death in Japan.
March 22, 1994... This essay on suicide in Japan, originally published in French, is a highly idiosyncratic personal meditation, not a disciplined work of social history. We learn from the dust jacket that its author, Maurice Pinguet (1929-1991) taught at...

Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674-1860.
March 22, 1994... Between the mid-seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth century, New England printers published hundreds of books, pamphlets, and broadsides relating to the lives and deaths of criminals. This literature encompassed a wide variety of genres, including...

Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community.
March 22, 1994... The contemporary theoretical discourse between essentialists and social constructionists resonates in the context of the rapidly developing field of lesbian history. Traditional conceptions of lesbianism and lesbian life as biologically governed,...

The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History.
March 22, 1994... This collection of essays provides an excellent introduction to the recent scholarship associated with a vaguely defined but increasingly popular subfield: the "new cultural history." While their approaches vary, the authors are linked by their...

Consumption and the World of Goods.
March 22, 1994... More than ten years have elapsed since the publication of The Birth of a Consumer Society.(1) It is a much-remarked paradox that although McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb wrote about the eighteenth century only recently have other historians turned...